Milo Is the Mini-Donald

If you halved Donald Trump’s age, changed his sexual orientation, gave him a British accent and fussed with his hair only a little, you’d end up with a creature much like Milo Yiannopoulos.

He could be Trump’s lost gay child. In fact, Yiannopoulos, 33, has a habit of referring to Trump, 70, as “Daddy.”

Trump the father and Yiannopoulos the son are both provocateurs who realize that in this day and age especially, the currency of celebrity isn’t demeaned by the outrageousness and offensiveness through which a person achieves it.

Both are con men, wrapping themselves in higher causes, though their primary agendas are the advancement of themselves.

Both believe that audience size equals value — and that having people listen to you is the same as having something worthwhile to say.

I heard nothing worthwhile during Yiannopoulos’s news conference Tuesday afternoon, though I heard a whole lot of Trump in him, and I wondered — no, shuddered — at a kind of worldview that may well be in ascendance, thanks to its validation by our president.

That worldview was distilled in Yiannopoulos’s response when a journalist mentioned Ann Coulter, to whom he is often likened. “I don’t take comparisons to Ann Coulter to be insulting,” he said. “She sells a hell of a lot of books.”

The point of the news conference, ostensibly, was to contain the damage from resurfaced recordings in which he jokes raunchily about having been sexually abused by a priest and makes light of pederasty, trafficking in the revolting, ridiculous myth that it’s no big deal in the gay world.

He framed his appearance before journalists as an apologia. But it was just as much an attack — on those journalists, who, he said, had deliberately misheard and conspiratorially mischaracterized his remarks about sexual activity before the age of consent.

“[Expletive] you for that,” he muttered.

The real Yiannopoulos kept bubbling up through the fake-sorry Yiannapoulos, who didn’t even pretend all that hard. Presenting himself as some kind of martyr and refashioning himself as some kind of hero, he couldn’t have had more of Trump’s DNA in him if he were Trump’s clone.

He described a speech that he gave in drag to 1,200 college students in Louisiana as something that “simply hasn’t happened in the history of this country before.”

He speculated that with similar events on other campuses, he had “probably done more for the image of gays in the flyover states” than all gay magazines and all gay advocacy groups combined.

Also, this: “I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech.” Behold his armor. Beware his spear.

He’s right that in America of late, there’s too much policing of indelicate and injurious language and too little recognition that the wages of fully open debate are ugly words and hurt feelings.

But he invokes free speech to exalt cruel behavior and lewd testimonials whose purpose is headlines and booking fees. When he goes on his racist and sexist tears or muses about his appetite for black men, he’s just a brat begging for attention, a showboat looking to fill seats.

And he may beg as he pleases. That is his right, one that I treasure. He just shouldn’t expect the rest of us to salute him for it — even though he briefly got the Conservative Political Action Conference to do precisely that. The group invited him to give an address at its conference this week, then rescinded the offer after the pederasty business.

Together he and Trump have exposed what a cynical, corruptible vessel modern conservatism is.

To hop aboard the triumphant Trump train, no small number of conservatives have mortgaged their belief in free markets, re-evaluated their attachment to free trade, muffled their professed concern for “family values” and basic decency, and put their wariness toward Russia on a shelf.

And in inviting Yiannopoulos, CPAC’s stewards set aside a homophobia that had long curtailed the role of gay Republican groups at the event. I’d praise that as a positive step toward a bigger tent except that the gay man who was being beckoned into it gleefully promotes destructive stereotypes about gays and other minorities.

CPAC wasn’t interested in inclusion. It was after the “ratings” that Trump always crows about, and ratings have overtaken principles in this mad, morally vacuous world.

“They may not be conservative,” he added, “but it’ll make for a hell of a show.” That’s what Yiannopoulos was poised to give CPAC. And that’s what Trump will provide on Friday, when he’s scheduled to perform.